Did Dubois hide Wadjak Man?

Gish (1985) and many other creationists have
claimed that Eugene Dubois, discoverer of Java Man, hid the existence of
two human skulls, called the Wadjak skulls, that had also been discovered
on Java. This claim is demonstrably false; there are three separate
publications by Dubois which mention the Wadjak skulls (Fezer, 1993).

(Wadjak 1 (shown) was discovered in 1888 by mining engineer B.D. van
Rietschoten. Wadjak 2 was more fragmentary and was discovered in 1890 by
Dubois.)

Lubenow admits the existence of these publications, but argues that
they were governmental reports not intended for public or
scientific scrutiny. As such, they do not count as part of the
scientific literature, and Dubois is still guilty of having, in effect,
concealed the existence of the Wadjak skulls.

Following is some email correspondence from prominent paleoanthropologist
C. Loring Brace, responding to this claim.

As for Wadjak, the first skull was given to Dubois by the
mineworks owner van Rietschoten. Dubois described it in a letter to Dr.
Ph. Sluiter (director of the library and Museum in what was then
"Batavia") which was published in the Naturkundig Tijdschrift van
Nederlandsch-Indie [1] vol. 49 (1890) pp. 209-211.
This was read at the Directors' Meeting in March 14, 1889. The journal
was not a major phenomenon like Nature or even the publication of the
American Museum of Natural History, but it was widely distributed and
available in Europe and America. Our library here at Michigan has it,
and I first read the University of California's copy years ago (or
perhaps even the one in Peabody at Harvard).

That was what sent Dubois to Java from Sumatra where he had been
for the previous few years, and, after getting there, he contributed
regular quarterly reports to the Verslag van het Mijnwezen which
Hrdlicka translates as the Government Mining Bulletin. I do not know
how this gets subsumed under Education, Religion and Industry [2], but it was a technical report that focused on
matters of mineral resources although it also included natural history
in general and paleontology in particular. In his report, titled in
each issue "Palaeontologische onderzoekingen op Java," he mentioned the
van Rietschoten find in the 2nd kwartaal 1890 on p. 19 noting that it
was of "another race than the Malay". In his report for the 3rd
kwartaal, 1890, he described his find of Wadjak II on page 15, noting
that it, like Wadjak I, indicated the presence "in Java in earlier times
of a human race that can be compared with modern Australians (or
Papuans)" (p. 15).

Then he repeats this in the Jaarboek van het Mijnwezen in
Nederlandschen Oost-Indie 20(2):60-61 in 1892. All of these reports,
although not major publications, should indeed be counted as a
legitimate part of the scientific literature. They are available in
major libraries all over the world, and have been referred to repeatedly
by the people who have continued to make further analyses of the Wadjak
material. Keith [3] was not very good at citing the
primary literature and could not use German (let alone Dutch) as a
scholarly language. I have had to read Dubois' accounts by struggling
to deal with the spelling/sound shifts that transform it into German,
but, when I have doubted my translations, I have checked them with a
colleague who is fluent in Dutch. Dubois clearly felt that his
"Pithecanthropus" material was of major significance, and he documented
what he considered to be its Pliocene age in fully creditable fashion.
By the faunal content, he clearly showed that Wadjak was late
Pleistocene which, he thought, made it relatively unimportant which is
why he did not devote much attention to it until after World War I.
Wadjak and 'Pithecanthropus' had nothing do do with each other in his
mind or in the views of any paleoanthropologist, and the attempt to see
something sinister in his treatment of Wadjak is based on equal parts
ignorance and malice.

All those references to Dubois' papers on Wadjak I sent you were
consulted by Hrdlicka in his Skeletal Remains of Early Man, Smithsonian
Miscellaneous Collection No. 83, 1930. It was Hrdlicka's references that
sent me back to find the originals which were not hard to locate. This
is the classic way that scientific documentation proceeds, and, if
nothing else, should illustrate in unassailable published fashion that
Dubois' work was part of the ongoing and publically available scientific
literature. Hrdlicka's work, of course, is one of the classics of the field.

With kindest regards,

C. L. Brace

Footnotes are by Jim Foley, not C. Loring Brace.

1. Best translated as "Journal of Natural History of
the Dutch East Indies" (now Indonesia). Judging from its name, it is
not, as Lubenow stated, a bureaucratic report to a government department.

2. Lubenow had claimed that "This publishing was
nothing more than Dubois's quarterly and annual reports to the Director
of Education, Religion and Industry of the Dutch East Indies...".

3. Sir Arthur Keith, a very prominent scientist in
the first half of this century. Keith may have been the inspiration for
the creationist claim that Dubois hid Wadjak Man because it would have
discredited Java Man as a human ancestor:

"... we cannot question his honesty; the Wadjak fossil bones were
discovered under the circumstances told by him. There can be no doubt
that if, on his return in 1894, he had placed before the anthropologists
of the time the ape-like skull from Trinil side by side with the
great-brained skulls of Wadjak, both fossilised, both from the same
region of Java, he would have given them a meal beyond the powers of
their mental digestion. Since then our digestions have grown
stronger." (Keith, "The Antiquity of Man", 1925; quoted by Lubenow)

Keith's comment, however, makes no sense. There is no obvious reason why
the Wadjak skulls, which were found in totally unrelated sediments with a
far more modern fauna than that of Java Man, should have affected its
interpretation in any way. The more plausible explanation for Dubois'
subsequent silence about the Wadjak skulls is that, because they were fully
modern skulls found in a fully modern fauna, they were much less
significant than the Java Man skullcap and Dubois simply never got around
to studying them.

Neither Keith, nor any other scientist as far as I am aware, has ever
said that Java Man and Wadjak Man were found "at the same level", as
often stated in creationist literature. This claim seems to be have
been invented by creationists.